Reformers rejected the Catholic practice of
allegorical interpretation and insisted on the
primacy of the literal sense of scripture. Why, then,
would a Puritan like Bunyan write allegory at all?
This fascinating question evades the searching
scrutiny to which Thomas Luxon subjects it. As his
title suggests, Luxon exposes tense contradictions at
the core of Protestant hermeneutics. Puritanism, he
argues, could not escape allegorical interpretation
even in its attempt to affirm typology as the plane
of the historically real because the maintenance of
what Luxon calls Protestantism's "two-world
ontology," based on the opposition of fiction
and reality, depends upon the perpetual allegorizing
of non-Christian "others." In the course of
this well-argued analysis, Luxon identifies certain
problems in Protestant allegory and hermeneutics
particularly as they are practiced by Bunyan.

Luxon begins by historicizing his subject in the
millenarian ferment of the seventeenth-century. The
appearance of "pseudo-Christs," or persons
claiming literally to be Christ, presents striking
confrontations between religious radicals and
authorities in ways that reveal "Protestantism's
anxieties over symbolic modes of thought" (24).
The case of James Nayler, punished with the savage
literalism of branding for re-enacting Christ's entry
into Jerusalem, is perhaps the most famous example.
Cases involving women are more important to Luxon's
argument because they emphasize relations between
carnal birth and spiritual rebirth as a trope in
Pauline theology. The treatment of women and birth as
mere figures subsumed in a male spiritual telos
and of Jews as incomplete prefigurations of a
Christian reality are paradigmatic of the negative
impact Luxon finds in Protestantism's relentless
allegorizing of the "other".

Luxon challenges the tendency of modern criticism to
assimilate the Reformation distinction between
allegory and typology. Specifically, he challenges
the idea that typology can be distinguished from
allegory because the former deals with
"historically real" persons and events. For
Luxon, this claim to historical reality amounts to a
euphemistic disguising of the Puritan commitment to
allegorical modes of thought. The affirmation of
typology may appear consistent with Puritanism's
iconoclastic ideals, but any treatment of history as
mere prefiguration relegates it to the status of a
pseudo-reality. Ironically, Luxon argues, typology
treats history "as God's fictional
representation" of "something else that
lies outside of history" (54), and is thus
allegorical. He then analyzes Genesis narratives in a
midrashic framework, sharing the conviction of other
critics that the Old Testament narrative is more open
to paradox, mystery, and diverse interpretations and
less concerned to assimilate otherness than its
Christian successors.

The final two chapters present important theoretical
insights into what Luxon terms Bunyan's
"anti-hermeneutics of experience."
Situating Bunyan between his Quaker opponent Edward
Burrough, with his emphasis on silence and inner
light, and state authority as portrayed in Sir John
Kelynge, who presided at Bunyan's hearing, Luxon
considers Bunyan's concept of praying in the spirit,
partly a political stance designed to resist the
state-imposed script of the Book of Common Prayer, to
be complicated by its desire to move from the
representational medium of language to an experience
of speaking in the spirit figured as spiritual
rebirth. In an insightful critique of Stanley Fish's
treatment of Pilgrim's Progress as a
"self-consuming artifact," Luxon finds
analogous traits between Bunyan's anti-hermeneutics
of experience and Fish's critical approach with its
emphasis on the reader's experience of the text.
Luxon's readings of both parts of the Pilgrim's
Progress call further attention to the
"metaphysics of insiders and outsiders"
(189) that he sees as germane to both allegory and
typology. Allegory projects the corruptions of the
insider onto the outsider who then may be
anathematized. Luxon consistently probes this
metaphysics and its consequences in Bunyan's time and
suggests its implications for our own.

Luxon's book is strongly polemical in its concern for
the intolerance that has often resulted from
literalist hermeneutics. I share his concerns, but I
would also acknowledge the potentially visionary side
of typology, particularly as it afforded writers a
framework for critical reflection on historical
commitment and revolutionary action in the context of
political defeat and disconfirmed or abandoned
millenarian expectations. Luxon exposes certain
metaphysical paradoxes in allegory's "two-world
ontology," but allegory could also perform the
political work of identifying and sustaining a
persecuted community. Even so, Luxon has issued an
important theoretical challenge to critical
assumptions about the notion of the "real"
in typology and allegory. His logical, scholarly, and
uncompromising argument will stimulate and inform all
students of Bunyan and the seventeenth century.

Responses to this piece intended
for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at EMLS@UAlberta.ca.